


Old snows melt

by keysmash



Series: Supernatural s5 Codas [15]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Clothes, Community: spn_30snapshots, Laundry, Loss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-12
Updated: 2010-01-12
Packaged: 2017-10-06 05:20:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keysmash/pseuds/keysmash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a hundred places where I fear<br/>To go,--so with his memory they brim!<br/>And entering with relief some quiet place<br/>Where never fell his foot or shone his face<br/>I say, "There is no memory of him here!"<br/>And so stand stricken, so remembering him!</p><p>from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "<a href="http://community.livejournal.com/deux_mille_mots/5650.html">Time Does Not Bring Relief</a>"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old snows melt

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the [Bobby's house](http://latentfunction.livejournal.com/tag/fic:+spn:+spn_30snapshots:+bobby%27s+house) arc of my [](http://community.livejournal.com/spn_30snapshots/profile)[**spn_30snapshots**](http://community.livejournal.com/spn_30snapshots/) [table](http://latentfunction.livejournal.com/349450.html), which deals with spoilers for 510; directly follows [They go on aching still](http://latentfunction.livejournal.com/375740.html). Written for prompt 15. Title from Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Dean found more dishes to do, even though Sam thought he'd cleaned everything that had been used at Bobby's in the past week. The water, which was cold enough at first to set Dean to wincing, eventually turned hot and steaming. Dean's fingers were red as he worked, and they'd be chapped and dry later if he kept this up, but Sam knew better than to mention it. He dried dishes for a while and the two of them worked silently together.

Eventually, Dean stepped back from the faucet and shrugged out of his coat. He held it out to the side, towards Sam, with wet hands, and Sam dried the fingerprints off the leather when he took it.

"Hang that up for me, wouldja?" Dean said, without glancing over. Sam nodded and laid his towel on the counter, next to his stack of dry dishes, before leaving the room.

They'd developed a particular set of rules about coats at Bobby's place, when they were kids. If they just stopped by for an afternoon, during one of the times where Dad only needed an hour or two of help, then coats went by the front door. There wasn't always something to hang them on, and sometimes they were left in a pile on the floor, so that dust hung to the fabric in chunky strips when the coats were put back on. Easy in, easy out, and they took all the mess with them. When they stayed overnight or longer, though, the coats went by the back door. Here, Bobby had a complete system of hooks and storage crates and even a bench to sit on.

Sam had spent his first winter break from Stanford with his roommate, whose mom had a room much like Bobby's boarded-over rear porch. She'd called it the mudroom, and it had been decorated in the same neutral shades as the rest of the house; Sam spent five weeks with the family and never saw a bit of dirt inside.

At Bobby's, though, it was just the back of the house, messy and muddy and well-used. Sam hung the coat up right where it always went, where Dad had put it and then where Dean seamlessly kept hanging it, and he stood staring at it for a moment while he thought. His own khaki jacket, wrinkled and stained, hung next to Dean's. He shrugged into it now and headed outside, to check on the laundry.

Some of Bobby's stuff was waiting, warm and fluffy, in the dryer, and Sam folded it into a basket before dealing with the sheets. He moved those into the dryer as quickly as he could, trying to keep from touching the chilled, wet fabric any longer than he had to, and then looked through the piles Dean must have already sorted, on top of the machines. They usually broke their laundry up into whites, filthy, and everything else, but Dean hadn't even gone that far, this time. The only system Sam could make out was that the really dirty stuff, the stuff that'd need to be thrown out if a cupful of bleach couldn't fix it, was lumped together on the left, and all their other stuff was on the right. Hell, the bigger of the two loads Dean came up with wouldn't even fit into the washer, and he sighed as he separated it into smaller piles.

Most of their stuff was old, and by default, anything that lasted long enough to become old had been worn hard. It was all threadbare, soft, and things Sam wore a few months ago were gone, lost to a hunt gone bad or a dryer that ripped holes in the clothes it tumbled.

On the other hand, he kept coming up with things he remembered wearing in high school, things that he'd left behind with the rest of his life but which Dean must have kept. He'd done the same while Dean was dead, cramming himself into too-small shirts and ignoring the glances Ruby shot him when she recognized things. Those clothes showed up in the pile, too, undershirts and button-downs that Sam hadn't been able to button. They all looked stretched out of shape now, but they were back to smelling the way they were supposed to, back to smelling like Dean.

He finally got all their messiest things, coated in mud and gravedirt and ashes from bones, separated and dumped into the washer. He let it fill with water without adding any soap, meaning to just let it soak and churn before actually being washed, and propped the basket full of Bobby's laundry on his hip as he headed back inside.

He ran into Dean in the back room, taking the coat from the peg and sliding it over his shoulders. He paused and raised his eyebrows when he saw the laundry under Sam's arms.

"I changed it," Sam said, pointlessly, and shoved the basket into Dean's hands as he shrugged out of his own jacket. It was just a beat-up Carharrt he found at a resale shop over the summer, when the winter things were priced to move, but when Sam hung it up, next to where Dean's coat would go, it seemed covered in someone else's life. Some stranger had scuffed up the left elbow; some other guy had ripped the back of the collar.

He took Bobby's clothes back while Dean put his own coat away. Sam could recognize scars in the leather that went back twenty years, scratches and smudges that had been there for longer than he could remember. Dad had worn this coat until he gave it to Dean, and Sam could barely remember when the change-over happened. The winter they spent in Minnesota, looking for a yeti, or maybe the same time he passed over the keys? Sam's own coat was meaningless in the face of Dad's, and looking at them both, he wished he was wearing some of this history around, too.


End file.
